van leeuwen's model

Van Leeuwen's semantic sociological model is one of the new approaches to and branches of critical discourse analysis, allowing critics to uncover the underlying layers of existing discourse by identifying the text's hidden layers and evaluating its social players.  The most often told story in the Holy Qur'ān is that of the Prophet Musa (AS), which because of its discourse system, the social character analysis, and discourse-oriented elements, one can better understand the text and uncover its hidden ideology. Using Van Leeuwen's model, the authors of this descriptive-analytical article thus attempted to analyze the discourse-oriented elements of the account of Prophet Musa (AS) in Surah Taha in order to determine how its social actors are represented. Thus, the most important question that the present research aims to answer concerns identifying the most frequent discourse elements of the account of Prophet Musa in Surah Taha according to Van Leeuwen's model, and the reason for this. The results show that van Leeuwen's discourse model is useful in evaluating the discourse system of Prophet Musa's (AS) story in this surah. Additionally, the frequency of the inclusion components (637 cases) is higher than those of the exclusion components (137 cases). This is consistent with the story's objective and indicates that the author plans to avoid hiding anything by showcasing proactive social agents so that the audience can easily and clearly learn the lesson.

The Constitutionalist era in Iran brought about a period of significant transformation, where Iranians were exposed to a multitude of new terms and phenomena, resulting in heightened awareness. This newfound awareness laid the groundwork for a shifting of power dynamics and eventually led to structural changes within the country. However, it is important to note that religious, political, and elite figures, shaped by their distinct backgrounds and interests, did not equally reflect these changes. Consequently, varying interpretations of key concepts such as freedom, equality, and law emerged, which were then reflected in the press and media of the time. This research aims to examine the representation of the concept of freedom in the press during a specific historical era, utilizing van Leeuwen's model as a framework. The focus is on analyzing newspapers such as Qanun, Habl al-Matin, Sur-e Esrafil, and Mosavat. The research method employed is content analysis, drawing upon van Leeuwen's theory of representation. The theoretical framework is based on his model, which comprises four key categories: authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis. These categories contribute to the discursive construction of legitimization, demonstrating how each element plays a role in legitimizing concepts within representations. Consequently, this research investigates the legitimization of events presented in the press utilizing van Leeuwen's model. Data has been collected from documents and the aforementioned newspapers during the two-year period of the Constitutional Movement, spanning from spring 1285 Sh to summer 1287 Sh.

Van Leeuwen’s (2008) critical discourse analysis approach is one of the analytical approaches of text. It has two main components including exclusion and inclusion, each one having different sub-components. The purpose of this research is to study and analyze the way the components of exclusion including suppression and backgrounding and some components of inclusion comprising impersonalization, categorization, personalization, passivation, generalization, and their subcomponents are manifested in representing social actors in “Bijan and Manijeh” story from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. In this regard, different types of sentences in this work were identified and counted. Then the usage frequency, percentage, and significance level of each component and the relevant sub-components were assessed via statistical analysis and Chi-square test. The research results show that the poet has used all sub-components of exclusion and the given components of inclusion under investigation in this story. Besides, Chi-square test results designate there is a comparatively significant relationship between the application frequencies of major intended components compared with each other and also their sub-components. The analysis of exclusion results reveals the poet does not have a tendency to secretly represent the social actors. Also, the results of the inclusion components under study demonstrate the poet has used positive appraisement and subjection sub-components and has tried to characterize the social actors more effectively with a positive value. Moreover, in most sentences, the social actors are represented by giving reference to their utterances, physical features, and using similes and metaphors.

One of the topics that many linguists have considered in recent years is discourse analysis. Different researchers have presented and developed various points of view about critical discourse analysis such as Hodge and Kress (1976), Foucault (1980), Fairclough (1996 and 2002), Penny Cook (2001), Wodak and Meyer (2001), Mouffe (2001), Van Dijk (2004) and Van Leeuwen (1996, 2008) among others. In this regard, Van Leeuwen's (2008) critical discourse analysis model is a socio-semantic model, which rests on interactions, actions, and reactions between individuals. In fact, the present study has exclusively been carried out based on this model in order to understand how social actors are represented and also to see whether the application frequency of various discourse components related to inclusion in the story of "Bijan and Manijeh" from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is significant or not.    The components of inclusion under discussion having been analyzed in accordance with this model are as follows: 1) Association, the way to represent the social actors in a group and bring them together in an action. 2) Activation, the component that is used when social actors are active and are dynamically represented. 3) Differentiation, which refers to a situation in which social actors are differentiated from other actors because of their identities. 4) Nomination, which is divided into types of sub-components of formal nomination, informal nomination, semi formal nomination, and titulation. In formal nomination, social actors are introduced by referring to their last names and in informal nomination they are represented only by their first names. In semi-formal nomination, social actors are represented by their first and last names and in titulation they are referred to by titles. 5) Specification, which is divided into three sub-components: Individualism, Aggregation, and Collectivization. Individualism is a device to represent social actors by referring to a specific and unique name, collectivization means representing social actors by referring to general classes and groups, and aggregation denotes representing actors by referring to numerical sets (Van Leeuwen, 2008).   The text under study in this research is the story of "Bijan and Manijeh" taken from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. This poem comprises a total of 1312 verses out of the entire Shahnameh book. This story is made of a series of events that are perfectly connected. In the first verses of the story, the poet speaks about a female storyteller who has narrated the whole story to him, and the poet tells this story to readers again. By considering the importance of the Shahnameh book and using the discourse-oriented components related to inclusion as developed in Van Leeuwen's (2008) model, we can deal with how social actors are represented in the text of this story and then the way it is possible to describe, compare and analyze the application frequency of each component and the relevant sub-components. Correspondingly, the questions of the present study are as follow:How are the types of discourse components of inclusion in Van Leeuwen's (2008) model under investigation represented in the "Bijan and Manijeh" story?What kind of relationship exists between the application frequency of the various inclusion components analyzed following Van Leeuwen's (2008) model in "Bijan and Manijeh" story?According to these questions, the hypotheses of this study are as the following:Different types of discourse components of inclusion under investigation are represented in accordance with the discourse components of Van Leeuwen's (2008) model in "Bijan and Manijeh" story.There is a significant relationship between the application frequency of different inclusion components analyzed following Van Leeuwen's (2008) model in "Bijan and Manijeh" story.

The subject of this research was focused on the Critical Discourse Analysis of two satirical works of “Book of poems of Lari Rooster ” by Abolghasem Halat and “The collection of works by Mohammad Ali Afrashteh”, compiled by Nosratollah Noohian, based on Van Leeuwen's model(1996). This research aimed to examine the influence of ruling powers and the ideological processes of the second Pahlavi era on the explicitness (frankness) and obscurity (inexplicitness) of the word in the two works mentioned. In this article, the actors  involved and participating in these satirical lyrics were evaluated based on Van Leeuwen's model components such as exclusion, impersonalization, determination, indetermination, nomination, categorization, association, differentiation, genericization and specification. We chose these works since the views of their satirist authors in the Pahlavi II era emanated from common social and political origins, while at the same time, they had different ideologies and tendencies. Therefore, such various commonalities and differences provide a basis to make comparisons between them. The study results suggested that although both satires are more eager to speak and write in obscurity and vague and classification and depersonalization are highly frequent in their poems, but unlike Abolghasem Halat, Mohammad Ali Afrashteh has enhanced the explicitness and frankness of his words by stating the names of the actors who were in power as well as criticizing the main pillars of power such as the king, royal court, clerics, and the security forces. Due to socialist tendencies, Mohammad Ali Afrashteh has also further used the referential type component to represent masses and people. Abolghasem Halat, with more use of the depersonalization component, namely, pronouns and obscure attributes, has made his word more obscure.

In this study, “Ab Bid” written by Mohammad Bahmanbeigi has been investigated according to Van Leeuwen's model (2008) to explore how the writer uses the representation of social actors to express his ideology and viewpoints. The writer, using suppression, excludes and deletes social actors of Pahlavi dynasty and at the same time, by nominating and activating the nomadic teachers, magnifies their educational actions. The people of “Ab Bid” have been passivized consciously by the writer to indicate their cultural poverty and to show how they have been neglected by the government. The writer, using  advantages of aggregation and presenting numbers and statistics emphasizes the importance of the nomadic teachers and the works of Tribal Education Department. Using anachronism, the writer reveals the existence of some prehistoric people at the time of the great ambitions of Pahlavi dynasty to challenge the government policies. By symbolization, Bahmanbeigi portrays the teachers of nomadic society as influential social actors. These findings confirm that the representation of social actors in “Ab bid” reflects the ideology and social viewpoints of the writer.

Critical discourse analysis is a new branch of discourse analysis that discusses the whyness of events and deals with information representation. It, in fact, views language as a form of social practice. The present study was undertaken within the realm of critical discourse analysis. It intended to compare Persian and English news articles (based on their application of socio-semantic discursive features) so as to determine the rate of mystification in them. To undertake the study, the version of Van Leeuwen’s (1996) model adopted by Yarmohammadi (2012) was used. The data of the study comprised a corpus of 6 Persian and 5 English news articles – all related to the US presidential election in 2016 – extracted using purposive sampling from Nasim Online and The Guardian newspapers. The results obtained from the chi-square tests revealed that the two newspapers were significantly different in their application of the explicit and implicit discursive features. In other words, explicitness was more prominent in The Guardian newspaper whereas the rate of mystification was more in Nasim Online. The general conclusion drawn from the study was that Persian news articles were less explicit than the English ones. This result was in line with the findings reported by Kaplan (1972).

Critical Discourse Analysis as a new discipline of discourse analysis in linguistics studies deals with the relation between language, power and ideology in society. The purpose of this paper is to study some samples of texts and pictures in "American English File" book based on van Dijk (1998) and Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) theory. The results show that the book is full of discourse factors, social and cognitive components such as socio- cultural systems. The authors have arranged the discourse of this book in such a way that covers their purposes and ideologies such as representing of western socio-cultural knowledge as clothing style, nourishment and social interactions, representing celebrities’, tourist places and racism attitude. As a whole, representing various aspects of western societies and soft transition of the western culture in this book as a relational bridge is so clear.